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Beat-Deafness Is Deeper than Dancing

Can't keep a rhythm? Biological oscillations might be to blame.
Image: Axel Lauer/Shutterstock

For most, "I can't dance" usually translates to "I won't dance because I'm awkward and cripplingly self-aware," yet for some it really means a fundamental deficit in sensory perception: beat deafness. Some would-be dancers and toe-tappers just can't keep a beat the way that some people can't see color. There's no rhythm; it just isn't there.

According to a study to be published this week in the journal Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, beat-deafness arises from a fundamental de-synchronization between the body's normal biological rhythms and external stimuli. The researchers, led by McGill University psychologist Caroline Palmer, were able to model linkages, or the lack thereof, between body's usual chronobiology (the overall phenomenon of periodic biological functioning) with external beat-oriented stimuli.

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Unlike the more pseudoscientific notion of biorhythms, chronobiology is a reasonably well-established feature of most life. In humans, it ranges from slowly moving circadian rhythms to heartbeats to the nasal cycle, the mostly unnoticeable yet continuous cyclic oscillation between congestion and decongestion occurring in humans about once every four hours.

These cycles are automatic but suggestible. As an example, Palmer offers a jogger induced to run faster in response to music of a higher tempo. Sleep cycles skewed by a string of overnight shifts might be another, or hunger in response to some appealing smell.

Beat deafness is rare enough—with the first case only being identified in 2011—that Palmer was able to find just two people that could participate in the study. That's a limitation to keep in mind. This lonely pair was compared with 32 not-beat-deaf subjects, a pool of participants with controls in place for varying income and educational levels.

The first task given to the participants was to create a beat on their own, with no stimuli. Just tap a foot in some sort of regular rhythm. Both of the beat-deaf subjects were able to accomplish this "quiet" tapping. Next, Palmer introduced sound stimuli: a metronome.

The most difficult test was to tap along with a metronome that suddenly became faster or slower.

"Most people had no problem, but the beat-deaf individuals were quite variable in their tapping—sometimes missing the beat by a large amount," said Palmer in a news release. "The most difficult test was to tap along with a metronome that suddenly became faster or slower."

"The non-beat-deaf were able to adapt to the changes within a few beats," Palmer continued, "but interestingly, the beat-deaf individuals were not able to synchronize with the new beat. The types of mistakes that beat-deaf individuals made indicated deficits in biological rhythms, including the natural frequencies or rates at which the internal oscillations pulsed, and how long it took them to respond to the new metronome tempo."

Beat-deafness remains a very new idea with unsettled implications for psychology, neurobiology, and likely beyond. "Nonmusical behaviors involving temporal coordination between individuals, such as conversational turn-taking or even simply adjusting one's gait to that of a companion, require sophisticated processes of temporal prediction and movement timing," Michael Arbib, a UCLA neuroscientist and biomedical engineer, wrote in the textbook Language, Music, and the Brain.

"It is of interest to know whether such processes share mechanisms with beat finding," Arbib noted. "Does temporally coordinated behavior with another person outside of the musical domain rely on the same brain network involved in tracking and predicting beats in music?" Dancing ability may mean a whole lot more than dancing.